# What is MTConnect?

Ladder99 uses **MTConnect** as the underlying data vocabulary - it was started by UC Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Sun Microsystems in 2008, and continues under active development. 

> _"MTConnect will be more important in the 21st century for manufacturing than CNC was for manufacturing in the 20th century."_ - John Byrd

![](../_images/mtconnect-timeline.png)


## MTConnect Agent

MTConnect provides a reference Agent, which accepts data from devices and transforms it to standard vocabulary. This data is then available to other applications, and to the user through a web interface, which is included in the Ladder99 pipeline -

![](../_images/agent-html_1200.jpg)


## Data Representation

For developers, the underlying data representation is primarily XML, though with MTConnect 2.0 is expanding to other formats, including JSON and MQTT. 

![](../_images/agent-xml.jpg)